Problems of Developing Researches on Women’s Political Leadership: A Bibliometric Analysis

The attention of researchers to the problems of recruiting new types of elites remains consistently high in the context of the modern political process transformation. But at the same time, the interest of researchers in women’s political leadership remains insignificant because the authors’ work continues to highlight gender inequality in politics, as demonstrated by the results of the study (113 publications versus 11,374). The paradigm of gender studies remains outdated: special attention is paid to the numerical indicators of women in top political positions, to the problems of unequal access and stereotypes of the electorate. Using the methodology of scientometric research approach, the author demonstrates the slow development of research problems of female political leadership in modern domestic science, as well as specifics and directions of development of research on possible institutionalization of women’s political leadership by means of bibliometric analysis of gender studies development on the basis of the e-library and RSCI. Citation analysis allows presenting statistics on the researched topic in popular search engines. The article notes that the problem field of female political leadership lies at the interdisciplinary interface of various scientific disciplines: political sciences, economic sciences, sociological sciences, psychological sciences and historical sciences. At the same time, the number of citations of publications on women’s political leadership more often prevails in economics, sociology and psychology. Researchers of leading Russian universities are mainly interested in the problems of women’s political leadership, including Lomonosov Moscow State University, structures of the Russian Academy of Sciences, The Presidential Academy RANEPA, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, etc. The findings of the study lead to conclusions about the well-established convictions in the scientific community among the gender researchers regarding inequality in politics. However, the transformation of the political process in recent years does not cause corresponding changes in the scientific paradigm among studies on women's political leadership.